Comments by "Mat Broomfield" (@matbroomfield) on "What’s lockdown like for secondary school pupils? - BBC Newsnight" video.
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@juliorosa9857 Your visits to the 3rd world are irrelevant. But nice attempt at virtue willy waving. We cannot take responsibility for everyone on the planet, but we can each do things for those within our sphere of influence.
When you talk about living standards across the globe, you sound like a parent saying to a child who just broke his arm "Kids in some parts of the world don't even HAVE arms." So what? There are ALWAYS people worse off. These kids live in a British society where wages in real terms have been falling for decades, where there is an educational arms race for fewer and fewer jobs, where automation and outsourcing looks to make millions of jobs obsolete, where there is a diminishing housing stock, and climate change threatens their very futures, all during a pandemic. All of which are valid reasons for very real stress. But I'm sure all that is not stressful enough because kids live on garbage dumps in South America right? And all these kids want is an education. How unreasonable. And I'm sure that you are aware that academic stress is one of the major sources of death among teenagers.
The photographer Manabu Yamanaka went and lived in an African village for a year to experience life on the very threshold of existence, and he described them as some of the happiest people he had ever known, which demonstrates that happiness is not correlated to poverty necessarily. Yes, there are starving kids, but security and safety are only one step higher on Maslow's hierarchy, and relationships only one step higher still. You're clearly a highly intelligent person, so how can you be so dismissive?
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